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Safe mode drivers

I have thought for a long time now that the device manager should appear the same in both normal and safe modes, so when I upgrade a machine's motherboard I clean out the device manager in safe mode and let windows find what it's really going to use. My queston is can drivers that are visable in safe mode cause system instability in normal mode?

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Safe mode drivers

Windows loads only necessary drivers when booting in safe mode. These are drivers that were loaded either by windows during an installation, or by you.Therefore, I would say that just because a driver is loaded, doesn't mean that it's the CORRECT driver for the device. Windows may still boot up, and operate, but FAIL once ANOTHER application has started in conjuction with the drivers that load in safe mode. In short, I belive that YES, a driver that acts fine in safe mode can fail in windows......Take care...REF

Safe mode drivers

True, very true, but the drivers are not visable in normal mode, they do exist in the windows registry, because a differant chip set motherboard was connected to an already loaded hard drive, then that hard drive found another motherboard with adifferant chipset, video card, modem, ect...,My real question is like say you boot into safe mode and under network adapter you have listed a 3com product and a realtek product and an intel product, but in normal mode you you see nothing but +'s beside your devices, and the realtek has no problems, but the machine locks up alot. Can this be a possiability to look at in trouble shooting win boxes?

Safe mode drivers

Yikes!!! This looks to me like the hard drive was installed on another machine and then moved to another puter and then your operating system reinstalled on it. Is this what has happened?When I do this (I do this frequently) during the reinstall phase, I have windows format the drive once again instead of leaving the drive "as is". I know this doesn't solve your problem but it might explain how it has happened.Good luck!

Safe mode drivers

Thanks for your feed back Mike, I really don't know how to explain this well. I have run into alot of what I call ghosted drivers, and as a habbit I remove them all in safe mode or copy system.1st over system.dat, which forces win to setup all hardware. I've noticed however that it's not just upgrades that I've noticed ghosted drivers, it seem to me win is indeed self currupting, guess I'll close this question after I get just a little more feed back.

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